The delightful author of that most appealing story, "The Friendly Road,"
had only to scratch the surface of things a little to find many a golden
nugget of friendliness and courtesy in the mines of the human spirit. As
I look back on my many thousands of miles of travel in this country I
find myself able to say with equal confidence that on the Roads of
Steel, and the lanes tributary thereto, where few of us would think to
look for such things, I too have found my golden nuggets without more
than half-trying to find them. I have already spoken of my friends among
the trainmen, to whose fidelity and watchful care I have owed my safe
transit and my comfort in many a long and weary stretch. They have been
an abundant source of happiness to me; but there have been others still,
in whose wit and fraternal companionship, and illuminating discourse, I
have found both pleasure and profit. Many of these have been the chance
acquaintances of the smoker and the observation car en route.
It does not happen often here in the East that we make friends "by
rail." Possibly it is because the distances traversed are comparatively
short. Perhaps too it is due to the Eastern Reserve, which is a State of
Mind, just as the Western Reserve has become several States of Being. I
know that the democratic Westerner traveling in the East finds us
apparently cold and unresponsive; though I doubt we are really so. We
are merely hurried, and possibly worried; too preoccupied to notice the
many little opportunities for friendly intercourse that a railway
journey presents.
It is my own impression that the distance to be traveled has largely to
do with this difference of manner between the Eastern man and his
brother from the West. The average Easterner who has never penetrated
the West farther than Sandy Hook has no real conception of the
magnificence of those distances about and beyond the Mississippi Valley.
At times when for reasons of business or pleasure I have gone from my
home in Maine to my encampment in New York, between the hours of six
P.M. on a Tuesday, say, and six A.M. of the following Wednesday, I have
passed through six separate American commonwealths: but in those Far
Western stretches I have time and again spent my full twenty-four hours
upon the road without in any wise finding myself subject to the rules
and regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Out of this rises, naturally enough, a difference in attitude toward
one's fellow travelers. There comes to be a greater sense of a settled
community interest on the longer journey, which brings with it greater
inclination for social intercourse with one's neighbors of the sleeper.
One of the conspicuous results of my contact with humanity on the road
has been that I have come to hold a very high respect for the traveling
man; so high indeed that where ten years ago I should probably have
spoken of him in the terms of our American vernacular as a drummer, I
have now definitely ejected that word from my vocabulary, save in its
narrower meaning as applied to that overnoisy person who beats that most
unmusical musical instrument, the drum, in our modern bands. These
commercial travelers average high in character and in intellect, and
the man who keeps his ears open while in their company can hardly fail
to learn much from their discourse. The best of them know their own
special lines from the ground up, and if my observation of them is
correct the very least of them are authorities on human nature.
I do not wish to boast, but I think that if some emergency should arise
requiring me to prepare offhand an article on suspenders, straw hats,
automobiles, or canned tomatoes, I could qualify as an apparent
authority, anyhow, from things I have heard directly from the good
fellows pursuing those particular lines, or have overheard in their
chats with others, in the smoking cars. More than once I have left a
symposium conducted by a group of these gentlemen almost obsessed with
the notion that our universities might be better qualified to do their
real work in life if the average college professor were able to "get his
stuff over" as humanly, as clearly, as entertainingly, and as
effectively as do the bulk of these advance agents of the American
industrial world. They are, according to their several capacities, full
of their subject, saturated with it, enthusiastic over it, and wholly
unreluctant when they get even half a chance to reveal their knowledge
to a ready listener.
I have met men on the road who were as eloquent on the subject of men's
underwear as I should like to be on the necessity of a cheerier spirit
in meeting the trials of life, and one effervescent soul on a Pacific
Coast trip once held me and mine spell-bound by his remarkable
disquisition on the spiritual influence of comfortable shoes, talking
for a longer time than I have ever yet listened willingly to a sermon on
some seemingly less homely topic. And as authorities on the state of the
nation, political, commercial, and spiritual--well, any kind of
administration, Republican, Democratic, Progressive, would not do badly
were it to summon a congress of these individuals to meet annually at
Washington, to confer with it, to inform it, and to lay before it
anything having directly or remotely to do with "things as is."
They are by nature diplomats, by instinct orators, and of necessity they
are profound students of human nature. They have to be adaptable to
circumstance, ready of resource, and full of tolerance. I take off my
hat to them, and heartily congratulate the business interests of the
United States to-day upon the high character and quality of manhood of
this splendid army in the field of commerce.
One of these good fellows several years ago enlivened me for many weary
hours on a tedious journey from Kansas City to Minneapolis. The journey
was full of annoying mishaps, thanks to a habit some of our Southern and
Western railway people have, lacking roses and other fresh flowers, of
strewing freight wrecks in my path. It is an expensive tribute; but I
would willingly go without it.
On this occasion my friend and I dined together, breakfasted together,
characterized our luck in a beautiful commingling of strong language
together, and together we watched the painfully slow operations of the
train wreckers removing that tributary debris from the tracks. He was
buoyant and undismayed by trial, and for hours he orated eloquently upon
his subject, which happened to be straw hats. When he got through, had I
taken notes, I could have qualified for a University degree upon that
subject if I had sought an S. T. D. (Doctor of Straw Tiling).
The vast gulf that separates the near-Panama from the real thing became
perfectly clear to me then, if it had never been so before, and I knew
how it had come about that a New Yorker could buy a Panama hat for two
dollars and fifty cents on Eighth avenue which on Fifth avenue would
cost him ten dollars; and why a three-dollar Leghorn purchased in
Chicago was inferior to a ninety-five dollar Leghorn manufactured in
Newark, New Jersey, was made so obvious that I have worn neither since.
His discourse was lucid, picturesque, convincing, and so completely
comprehensive that women's hats became no more of a mystery to me than
are those which our truck horses wear in midsummer with their ears
sticking up through holes in the crown. As we drew near our destination
I suddenly observed a smile breaking out on his lips, and a decided
twinkle in his eye.
"Good Lord!" said he. "I've only just realized that I have been talking
you deaf, dumb, and blind for nearly twenty-four straight hours, without
giving you a chance to slide in a word edge-wise. I hope I haven't made
you think life's nothing but a hat to me?"
"On the contrary," said I, "I've learned a lot. You've made life worth
living."
"I get so infernally interested in my business," said he
apologetically, "that sometimes I don't realize that maybe the other
fellow has something to say too. I meant to have asked you this morning,
but I forgot. What's your line?"
I was seized with a jocular impulse, and I answered instantly "Natural
gas."
He looked at me with a puzzled expression. "Natural gas?" he repeated.
"That's a queer business. How do you make deliveries?"
[Illustration: "When he got through I could have qualified for a college
degree on the subject of straw hats."]
"Come around to the lecture hall with me to-night and I'll show you,"
said I.
He threw his head back and roared with laughter. "By George! the
dinner's on me!" he said.
He accompanied me to the hall that evening, and sitting in the front row
gazed at me quizzically all through my labors--full of sympathy and
understanding, however--and after the affair was over and he joined me
for my return journey to the hotel he slapped me hard on the back.
"Some gas, all right!" said he. "I wouldn't blow that out if I could!"
Which I took to be one of the most genuine compliments I have ever
received.
I have never in any of my trips felt myself in danger of assassination,
and yet one of these chance acquaintances of mine involved me by his
love of practical joking in an implied ultimatum from a stranger of a
most awe-inspiring nature. In leaving a California city some years ago I
found myself seated with a group of other travelers just inside the rear
door of the observation car. The train had come to a sudden standstill
alongside a row of flourishing olive trees, and the traveling man (if I
remember correctly he was to Suspenders what Darwin was to the Origin of
Species) jumped from the platform and plucked a handful of their fruit
from branches overhanging the border of the road. Three of these he
passed in to me, and in the innocence of my young heart I immediately
plumped one of them into my mouth, and bit into it.
The result I shall not attempt to describe. Our dictionaries have at
least a dozen separate and distinct terms signifying that which is
bitter, no single one of which is adequate even to intimate the taste of
that olive. There are such expressions as "gall and wormwood"; there are
adjectives involving such qualifications of taste as "acrid,"
"nauseous," "sharp," "tangy," "stinging," "rough," and "gamy." None
suffices. I have tasted rue, I have tasted aloes, I have tasted quassia,
and I have nearly died of squills. As a small boy I once started in to
chew a four-grain quinine pill that had been rolled with no ameliorating
ingredient to take off the tang of it. But never in my life before or
since have I tasted anything comparable to that olive for pure,
unadulterated acerbity. It was an Ossa of Gall piled on a Pelion of
Wormwood--I might say that it represented the complete reunion of that
Gall which the historians of the past have told us was "divided into
three parts"--and I suffered accordingly.
But when I saw that traveling man's eye full of twinkling joy fixed upon
me I resolved not to let him know that the horrid thing was not the most
exquisite bit of ambrosial sweetness that had ever been perpetrated upon
my paralyzed palate. I simply chewed quietly ahead, externally as calm
and as placid as any cow that ever fletcherized her cud.
"How is it?" asked another traveler, sitting alongside me.
"Delicious!" said I. "Have one."
And I handed him over one of my two remaining olives. He was as innocent
as I, but not quite so self-controlled. Even as I had done, he too
plumped the olive into his mouth, bit into it--and forthwith exploded. I
shall not repeat here the appeal to Heaven that issued from his lips
along with the offending olive itself. Suffice it to say that although
there were several ladies present it was verbally adequate. And then out
of the depths of the car, from a physical giant lolling at ease in a
plush-covered arm chair, came a deep, basso-profundo voice.
"_I'd kill any man who did that to me!_" it said, with a vicious
aspirate at the beginning of the word kill.
But there was no murder done, and before night as our train rolled over
into Nevada we were as happy a family as one will be likely to find
under any kind of roof in the far-off days of the millennium.
It is not often that we look for fine literary and other distinctions in
the minds of men engaged in the humbler pursuits of life, and yet from
two of my chance acquaintances en route, both barbers, I have gathered
subtleties of line that have remained with me impressively ever since.
The first of these worthy toilers and subconscious philosophers I
discovered in a Chicago hotel in 1905. I was on my way into Iowa for a
week of one-night stands, having come almost directly from one of the
most delightful of my literary opportunities--Colonel George Harvey's
dinner in honor of Mark Twain's seventieth birthday.
The stains of travel needed to be removed, and I sought the aid of the
hero of my tale, a stocky little chap, whose face suggested an ancestry
part Spanish and part East Side New York. I will say that judged
externally I should not have cared to meet him in a dark alley after
midnight; but inwardly he turned out to be a pretty good sort of fellow.
His speech was pure vernacular.
As he was cutting my hair I glanced over the supplement to that week's
issue of "Harper's Weekly," at that time under Harvey's control, devoted
to a full account of the Mark Twain dinner both in picture and in text.
In turning over the leaves to see what kind of melon-shaped head the
flashlight photographer had given me I came upon the counterfeit
presentment of the group of which I had been a member, and was relieved
to find that the print had treated me fairly well, and that instead of
looking like a cross between a professional gambler and a train robber,
as most of my published portraits have made me appear, the thing was
recognizable, and in certain unsuspecting quarters might enable me to
pass as a reputable citizen. The snipping of the scissors back of my ear
suddenly ceased as I gazed upon my alleged "liniments"--as an old friend
of mine used to call them--and the barber's voice broke the stillness.
"Say," he said, pointing with the scissors point to the portrait of
myself, "that guy looks sump'n like you, don't he?"
"He ought to," said I. "Me and him's the same guy."
"Well whaddyer know about that!" he ejaculated. "Really?"
"Yep," said I.
"And you're from New York, eh?" he went on, resuming his labors. "What's
the name?"